Screening Misses Troubled Troops

Most soldiers aren't checked for a history of mental disorders, an investigation shows.

Second in a series.

In the 17 months after their son, Eddie, announced he was heading off to fight the war on terror, Margaret and Edward Brabazon of Bensalem, Pa., had held their breath.

They had taken him in as a foster child at age 3 and adopted at 12. The boy had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and attention-deficit disorder by age 10. He had spent his early teen years in a psychiatric hospital and group homes for the emotionally disturbed.

They had watched with bewildered pride as the young man was handed a uniform and an M-4 rifle and accepted into an elite fraternity -- the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment based at Fort Bragg.

"We were surprised they took him, with the kind of mental problems he had, but we figured the Army must know what they're doing," Margaret said. "We didn't think they'd send him into combat."

Today, the Brabazons regret those assumptions.

On March 9, 2004, less than three months into his second deployment to the Middle East, Spc. Edward W. Brabazon shot himself in the head with his rifle in Baghdad, the Army has concluded. He was 20.

Eddie Brabazon was there because the U.S. military has knowingly sent mentally ill troops to Iraq -- in conflict with its own regulations -- and turned a blind eye to the mental fitness of thousands of other service members, a Hartford Courant investigation has found.

Despite a congressional mandate to assess the mental health of soldiers sent to a combat zone, interviews and Defense Department records obtained by The Courant reveal fractured pre-deployment screening in which less than 1 percent of deploying soldiers see a mental health professional. The practice has put unfit service members in harm's way, raising risks for suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The military's own studies suggest that as many as one in 11 troops is suffering from a major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder or PTSD, which impairs their ability to function at the time they are deployed. But military screeners have arranged mental evaluations for fewer than one in 300 deploying troops, according to a Courant analysis of screening data for more than 930,000 troops processed from March 2003 through October 2005.

Overall, soldiers who screened positive for possible mental health problems were deemed fit for war 85 percent of the time, according to the data. Those deployment decisions were made although more than 93 percent of troops who screened positive never received a referral to a mental health specialist.

"Command pressure to deploy their people has kind of swept away any efforts that might have been made to improve screening," said Kathleen Gilberd, of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

The Courant's analysis of confirmed and likely suicide cases among U.S. troops in 2005 shows that at least seven, or about one-third, of the soldiers who killed themselves in Iraq did so within three months of being deemed mentally fit and sent into combat.

Experts say most of those who take their own lives are suffering from depression or bipolar disorder at the time, and that it is doubtful soldiers would spontaneously develop a serious mental illness so quickly after deployment.

The pre-deployment screening misses so many troubled troops in part because it relies entirely on self-reporting -- one question on a written form -- of receiving mental health care in the past year. It's disclosure that troops are unlikely to make.

In the first 32 months of the war, just 3 percent of deploying troops disclosed that they had sought care or counseling. That self-reported level is far lower than the more than 20 percent of deploying troops who were found to have mental disorders -- 9.3 percent of them serious -- in a 2004 study by military doctors.

Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general, acknowledged that the questionnaire, developed to comply with a 1997 law, is "not very effective" in identifying troubled soldiers.

An Army sergeant from North Dakota answered "yes" to the pre-deployment question.

Three months later, he shot himself in the head in his Iraq duty, an Army investigation said. *